With FireFox's Tab Candy Feature, We'll Finally Achieve Tab Nirvana

I never would have thought that an improvement in tab technology would have me fist-pumping in front of my computer, but this video preview for FireFox's forthcoming Tab Candy feature, which spatially organises and groups tabs, really has me jazzed.

All of the symptoms covered in this video - 50 tabs open at once, scrolling endlessly through said tabs, information guilt - these are all things I suffer from every day, and I've long yearned for a better way to navigate all those tabs. Tab Candy, offering an expose-style overview of all the stuff you have open, is pretty much exactly the solution I had been dreaming of.

Sure there are potential issues with memory hoggage - with Tab Candy, why would I ever close a tab again! - but as the video points out, the developers are working to optimise the system for such usage. If you want to brave a rough, "super-early" build of Firefox 4 beta with Tab Candy, you can do so here. Personally I'm just glad tab salvation is finally on its way. [Aza Raskin via Tech Crunch]

Comments

Paul McManus Guest

Jul 25, 2010, 9:27am

"After browsing for a day" .. firefox is consuming 500MB of memorym running like a dog and needs to be restarted fresh. No hang on, that's 2 hours.

Also .. you can drag tabs of a window to create a new instance of Firefox, and then drag tabs between those windows. Isn't that a whole lot easier?

Unfortunately you are right the harddrive and memory is filled pretty fast and you didn't even mention the fact that Firefox is unable to separate the windows in independent instances or threads. For instance if one tab crashes because a plug-in isn't working well or the site is badly coded you are suddenly faced with problem that closing the tab isn't possible because Firefox is not responding. The next thought is to close the window which includes this dead tab. You do it and boom all Firefox windows are gone and Firefox is completely shutdown. I hope, you work on a very stable sandbox solution for TabCandy which uses the RAM and harddrive memory efficiently.

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